Using fixed/alternative font

Compare It! now let's you work with two different font types. You can quickly toggle font usage in editor, or automatically choose specific font depending on file type.

Recommended uses of two-fonts approach

Automatically using fixed font for tabular data (*.xls, *.csv), and proportional font for all others.
You can configure alternative font to be of smaller size, and quickly manually switch it, when you need to see more data at once.

What is "fixed" font anyway?

There are two big groups of fonts in Windows - fixed and proportional fonts. In a fixed font, such as Courier, every character occupies the same amount of horizontal space, like typewritten characters. In a proportional font, such as Arial or Times New Roman, character width varies. As result fixed fonts are clear and generally easier to read, they are also invaluable when viewing columns data. On other hand, proportional fonts are more compact and let you see more in given screen width.
Fixed font example: String width depends only on characters count, not on content. 123456 ABCDEF UVWXYZ With proportional fonts
you can easily see the difference:

123456
ABCDEF
UVWXYZ

I already use fixed font. Why do I need the second one?

Probably you don't. We have added additional fixed font support to ensure all users can normally see differences in tabular data. But even if you current font is fixed (and default font is!), you can still get some value from it. Just make it smaller and quickly switch to alternative font when you need to see more.

To define main and alternative fonts

You can change both fonts in Editor's options in menu .

To quickly toggle between fonts

You can switch which font to use by invoking menu command . Default shortcut is Ctrl + F12.

To associate fixed font with specific file types

In File filters you can now set an option to always use fixed font for chosen file types.